Throughout her life, my
mother remained deeply attached to her parents and our extended family. As a
child, I remember her sitting at her ancient Royal portable typewriter pounding
out and forever polishing stories for us, her children, her newspaper column
readers, her radio and television listeners and viewers, and finally, back to
us, her children. Mother wrote our family history in a way few parents
memorialize the passing times and events and their family's place in time. Mom
wrote widely about politics, community affairs, the public radio and television
business, mental health, farm worker housing, the United Nations, and other
contemporary topics, recording her observations in her very legible script in
seven huge Meyer history family volumes.

She started our family book
when my twin sister, Noel, and I were born, and continued her writings way into
the adolescence and early adulthood of my younger sister Deborah. Once each
volume of writings, letters, photographs, newspaper clippings got to "critical
mass" -- four to eight inches thick -- she would take them to a book binder to
have each volume saddle stitched and bound in leather, with a gold embossed
spine title and volume number. My twin sister is the archivist for six of the
seven volumes; my younger sister, the last volume. The paper on which Mom
recorded our family's history, in journal and commentary fashion was not acid
free and has started to deteriorate over the years. I have begun a project to
permanently recover as much of the material as time allows.

In terms of whose life
was being chronicled, Deborah definitely got the short end of the stick. By the
time Mom started Debby's volume, the seventh, she and Dad had moved to Florida
to take care of her aging parents. There is a noticeable diminution in Mom's
output regarding my younger sister after Dad and Mom and Debby made that move.

What she did, though, was
change her focus. As soon as Mom settled in Florida, she wrote a sequence of
literarary quality stories about her upbringing, her parents' extended families,
and the last years of her parents' lives. She continued to polish these stories
up to a month or so before her death in El Paso at the age of 71. As a writer,
Mom was ahead of her time. She tackled the topic of adult children caring for
their fading parents, parent and child attachment and enmeshment, her own
struggles with Bi-Polar disease, alcoholism, bulimia, promiscuity, profound
self-doubt and depression, and living with my Asperger Syndrome (undiagnosed)
father, a man thirteen years older than herself who she married as a storm
anchor on seas she largely roiled and boiled herself.

One of the stories, I
Think You're Just Wonderfu,l Toodles, seems oddly out of place unless the
reader knows that Mom fought weight all of her life. She was an obese , 4'-10"
fireplug of a woman who always had her clothes tailored for her otherwise
impossible to fit body. No matter how old she grew she was ever mindful of the
professional figure she cut. This story is Mom's likely reconstruction of her
personal equivalent of a "beauty parlor story." Mom wasn't into "woman
gossip." She remained a keen observer of people, and eschued small talk. While
she used hair dressers, her primary focus was on her body, and in this story,
age and the human condition. Hence this story.

These are intimate, heart
warming, heart wrenching stories. After reading some of them, I hope you can
have some sense of the kind of woman she was: complex, more than occasionally
Hell to live with, a passionate lover and liver of life, always blazing her own
path, leaving others in her wake with raised eyebrows, a sense of admiration and
wonder at her accomplishments, and not as much saddened or surprised by the news
of her death, a suicide, at the age of 71 as they would be of just another old
person ending her life in this way.

Mom's story Mama Mama
encompasses her profound adult child's agonized thoughts about her mother, whose
undiagnosed Alzheimers Disease began exacting its toll on my grandfather and his
daughter beginning in her mid fifties. This story was published as the
centerpiece of an edition of the Miami HeraldTropic Sunday
magazine supplement published six months after mother's death.

Remembrances of those who
knew her in Norway, Maine, her last "permanent home" and Miami, her home for
seventeen years before, plus Mom's last letter on the day of her death are foundhere.

Although I have not
placed an individual copyright in her writings, each and every one of Mom's
stories is, in fact, copyright. The same copyright rules apply to her writings
as to all contents of this web site.

INDEX

Each of the titles listed below
is a link to one of Mom's stories or remembrances of her.